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Cunning, Care and Sheer Luck Save Rare Map

Jonathan P. Derow, a specialist in restoring documents and artworks on paper, at the Brooklyn Historical Society with the 1770 map of New York City he helped bring back to life.Credit
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

It was rolled up among other yellowed maps and prints that came off a delivery truck at the Brooklyn Historical Society’s stately office near the East River. Carolyn Hansen, the society’s map cataloguer, began to gently unfurl the canvas.

“You could hear it rip,” said Ms. Hansen, 29, still cringing at the memory. She stopped pulling. But enough of the map, browned with age and dry and crisp as a stale chip, was open to reveal a name: Ratzer.

“We have a Ratzer map,” said James Rossman, chairman of the society, who happened to be in the building that Monday last May. That statement, despite the reverence in its delivery, meant little to the others in the room, but it would soon reverberate in cartography circles and among map scholars.

The name Ratzer is invoked as something of a Da Vinci of New York cartography, and the map was an early edition of his best-known work: a Bernard Ratzer “Plan of the City of New York” in its 1770 state.

There were widely believed to be only three copies of this exact map in existence. One of them belonged to King George III and remains in the British Library in London, where it is displayed occasionally. The other two — one legible, the other tanned and dark with shellac — are at the New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side and remain in storage but for two or three times a year, when they are pulled out for students.

Restoring this surprise fourth map, aged beyond its 240 years by its destructive shellac coating, became an immediate priority in Brooklyn. Its transformation from literally untouchable to clearly legible and mounted behind glass, to be unveiled at a private party at the society on Wednesday night, involved science, patience and more than a little bit of kitchen-sink cunning, calling to service, at one delicate point, boiling pots of old books used to distill the color of aged paper.

Not that anyone at the Brooklyn Historical Society knew what it had. The map had been delivered from the society’s warehouse in Connecticut. The society said it had no catalog listing the map or when it had been acquired. It had been shellacked and mounted on linen, with a wooden pole attached at the bottom, presumably to bestow a more artistic air. It had probably hung on a wall somewhere for who knows how long, but in May it was in disastrous shape.

The map had been cut in long strips to allow it to be rolled up for storage. The strips were so brittle they broke when touched. It took a lot of squinting and bending, breath held in, to discover that it was a Ratzer 1770 — its name perhaps an error, as it was most likely completed in 1769.

A British Army officer in America, Lieutenant Ratzer was a surveyor and draftsman, and his map was immediately praised as a step forward from those of his predecessors. For his trouble, his name was misspelled on initial versions of his maps, called the “Ratzen plan.”

The map included a detailed rendering of the island’s slips and shores and streets in Lower Manhattan, the familiar mixing with the long gone. Pearl, Broad, Grand and Prince lay beside Fair and Crown and the “Fresh Water” pond.

“Manhattan, at least the part shown here, was mapped as precisely as any spot on the Earth at the time,” said Robert T. Augustyn, co-author of ”Manhattan in Maps: 1527-1995” (Rizzoli International Publications, 1997). “There was no more beautiful or revealing a map of New York City ever done.”

There are notable buildings: “The Powder House,” “The City Hall,” “The Prison,” “The Theatre.” Mr. Ratzer included detailed topography, with hills and woodlands near Kips Bay and Turtle Bay that have disappeared.

Photo

The 1770 map before, left, and after its restoration.Credit
Brooklyn Historical Society

“It’s one of the ways we know about how this place looked before the grid really took hold,” said Matthew A. Knutzen, geospatial librarian in the New York Public Library’s map division.

The bottom of the map contains a striking illustration of the view of Manhattan as seen from Governors Island, with ships, soldiers, waves and smoke. Brooklyn, or “Brookland,” is a patchwork of farms of different shades, bisected by Flatbush Road.

A later version known as the second state, published in 1776 and nearly identical to the first except for a tiny line of text from the publisher, is more common. England’s 1770 state was presented to George III and remained in his expansive collection. “Publishers gave him one as soon as it came off the press,” said Peter Michael Barber, head of the cartographic and topographic materials department at the British Library.

The two 1770 maps at the New-York Historical Society were gifts of its founder, John Pintard, on Jan. 4, 1810, according to its catalog. That would make, barring the existence of other copies unknown to map archivists, this fourth map in Brooklyn the first one discovered in 200 years.

The provenance of the Brooklyn map is a little murky. On the back of the linen that Ms. Hansen began unrolling last May, the name Pierrepont was clearly legible, from the prominent Brooklyn family. But there was no indication how or when it came to land in the Connecticut warehouse, the society said.

Fearful of causing more damage, the society called Jonathan P. Derow, a paper conservationist in Park Slope, who came right over. “It was in terrible condition,” Mr. Derow, 44, said. “I suggested it not be rerolled. Every time it was handled, more pieces were broken apart, and the damage was increased.”

It was too brittle to move to his office, so he made a makeshift plastic tent in the society’s office and inserted a humidifier. The hard paper softened, and Mr. Derow, a conservationist since 1991, carried it away in a mode unthinkable at the time of the map’s creation: a Zipcar.

He washed the map for four days in an alkaline bath that removed acid and grime, and he cut away the linen backing. He aligned the pieces, using a strong magnifying glass and tweezers, and let the map dry, only to see tiny gaps appear between strips, the result of the paper’s shrinking. He rewet it and started over, but let the pieces overlap slightly. That worked: the map shrank perfectly in place.

White lines were visible where the map had ripped, the brighter inner fabrics of the paper standing out from the stained surface. Mr. Derow visited Argosy Book Store on the Upper East Side and bought a handful of obscure old books — among them, for example, “The Select Dialogues of Lucian, to Which Is Added, a New Literal Translation in Latin, With Notes in English,” from 1804 — that were printed on cloth paper, like the map, and not wood pulp.

He performed on them a technique that should chill the blood of any author, wondering where his books will be in 200 years: he baked them in his kitchen stove and boiled them in water. He painted the resulting brackish stew onto the white lines, matching them to the rest of the map.

Did he ever, perhaps in a rush, consult the map for a meeting in an unfamiliar part of town? “There’s barely anything about Brooklyn on there,” he said.

He framed the finished product behind plexiglass. The society, which paid a reduced rate of $5,000 for the restoration, plans a public viewing in the future.

There is no hurry. “It will last for hundreds and hundreds of years,” Mr. Derow said.

A version of this article appears in print on January 17, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cunning, Care And Sheer Luck Save Rare Map. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe